Firm Tracking Purchase, Transaction Histories of Millions Maybe Not Really Anonymizing Them

The nation’s largest financial data broker, Yodlee, holds extensive and supposedly anonymized banking and credit card transaction histories on millions of Americans.

Internal documents, however, appear to indicate that Yodlee clients could potentially de-anonymize those records by simply downloading a giant text file and poking around in it for a while. That includes a unique identifier associated with the bank or credit card holder, amounts of transactions, dates of sale, which business the transaction was processed at, and bits of metadata.

Source: Report: Firm Tracking Purchase, Transaction Histories of Millions Maybe Not Really Anonymizing Them